“I think you know exactly whose wrist it’s on, and I think you’ve known all along,” Paul said. “Because the woman you sent for it knew exactly whose wrist to tug on.”
There was something about that phrase—“wrist to tug on”—that triggered a connection in my mind. “Mac said his hand smelled like chicken—that ghost was using my cup of pan drippings to grease Mac’s wrist and get the bracelet off, wasn’t she?” I said to Sergeant Elliot.
The sergeant looked stunned. His mouth flapped open a few times, and then he vanished into thin air.
“That’s becoming a rude habit,” I said, even though he was already gone.
Alison squinted at Paul as if he were harder than usual to see. “What was that all about?” she asked. I wondered if she’d seen Sergeant Elliot at all, but she had been looking in his direction when he spoke.
Paul let out a nervous chuckle, which is sort of incongruous coming from a transparent man calf-deep in floor. “It was a gamble, and I don’t usually approve of gambles,” he said. “But I think that one paid off.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I think I might have just solved this case,” Paul said.
Chapter 8
“Okay,” Alison told Paul. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”
“I can’t yet,” Paul answered. “The sergeant will be back, and I think we can help him, but we need to do a few things first. Where is Mac?”
“In his room,” I said. “Why?”
“Soon, someone will need to ask him to come out here,” Paul said.
Melissa began clearing dishes from the island and putting them in the sink. “Don’t wash them yet, Liss,” Alison told her. “We’ll have to boil some water first. The radio said some of the water supply is not being filtered because of the storm. We don’t know if ours is affected yet.”
“Okay.” Melissa looked up at Paul while Alison moved to fill a large pasta pot (which I’m fairly sure she never uses) with water in order to boil it for use later.
“I can knock on Mac’s door,” I said, “but he might be asleep.”
“You’ll have to wake him up,” Paul said.
Alison’s eyebrows rose. “Why don’t you do it?”
“I would, believe me, but Mac doesn’t see ghosts.”
“He’d feel a bucket of cold water if we threw it on him,” Maxine suggested. Her solutions to problems are often effective, but not always subtle. She’s always trying.
“You said before the sergeant came that you’d found something useful,” I reminded Paul. “But you didn’t say what.”
“In a minute. Alison, do you think the refrigerator has been running long enough to give Maxie a chance with the Wi-Fi network?”
Alison considered, then nodded. “We can let it go for a while; it won’t hurt anything. But there is some water in the basement, even if it’s not much. I want to get the extension cord down to the sump pump and maybe pump out the water so we can be ready before it gets dark.”
Paul seemed to agree; he looked at Maxine, who was already heading for Melissa’s room in the attic. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said. Alison picked up a candle and headed for the door to get the things she needed for an Internet connection. Paul, pacing as if there were a floor beneath his feet, appeared to be considering options. His eyes were almost gleaming, even as they were transparent. I’d rarely seen him look so happy.
I didn’t want to disturb his train of thought, and Melissa seemed fascinated with watching him think, so I said nothing. But the facts of the situation with Sergeant Elliot and the POW bracelet were perplexing me in a way that I think escaped the others in the house. None of them understood, because none of them (aside from Mac) were old enough to have been part of the era the bracelets were made and distributed.
You weren’t supposed to take off a POW bracelet until the soldier in question was accounted for. Many people removed theirs, sadly, when it was discovered that the person whose name they wore had been confirmed as killed in action. Not nearly as many others received good news about their POWs, but there were cases of men—they were almost all men—recovered either from a prison or simply as part of a sweep of the area. It was years after the war was over for the United States before the bracelets stopped being fairly common sights on wrists all over the country.
But if Sergeant Elliot’s fate had never been confirmed, that meant Mac was technically right in keeping the bracelet on his wrist all these years; he was in fact honoring the sergeant’s memory as he understood it.
I knew a number of people who had taken off the bracelets without really confirming that it was time to do so. Having seen so many ghosts over the years, I’d been squeamish about giving mine up, and even when I did decide not to wear it every day, I had never really put it away for good.
So the question that I couldn’t quite articulate yet was about the bracelet itself. The only way Mac’s bracelet would stand between Sergeant Elliot and the next level of his existence (if his claim that the bracelet and the person named on it were linked somehow) would be if Mac had the only bracelet with Sergeant Elliot’s name on it. That seemed impossible—there were many bracelets made with each POW or MIA soldier’s name imprinted on them.
I was about to ask Paul about it when Alison returned to the kitchen, carrying the small box that connected to the Internet. “I hope the towers are up and running,” she said.
“The Internet doesn’t work like a cell phone, Mom,” Melissa informed her as Alison unplugged the refrigerator from the generator and plugged in the network.
Maxine came down from the ceiling in her trench coat, from which she immediately pulled the old MacBook Alison had reluctantly given Maxine to do research on and had rarely seen since. Maxine’s clothing immediately reverted to her usual jeans and a black T-shirt whose legend read, “Yes?”
“What am I looking up?” she asked Paul as she hovered over the center island.
“First, find out anything you can about Barbara Litton, Sergeant Elliot’s ex-fiancée,” Paul told her. “I have a theory, but no evidence yet to support it. That’s your job, Maxie, but if I’m right, it won’t take you long.”
She didn’t respond; she just started clacking away on the keys. “This thing won’t hold a charge for more than a minute,” she told Alison, pointing to the laptop. “Can I plug in?”
Alison plugged the power cord into the generator and handed the other end up to Maxine, who rose a few inches as Alison extended her arm. “Very funny,” Alison said.
“What?”
Maxine grinned as she reached down to take the cord and plug it into the laptop, then began clicking keys again. She seemed very engrossed, so I took the opportunity to mention my confusion about the POW bracelet to Paul.
He listened very carefully, as he always does, and made a pyramid of his fingers under his nose. “Couldn’t it be simply that Mac just kept wearing the bracelet out of nostalgia?” he asked when I was through. “He seems . . . unusually loyal to that period in time.”
“Maybe, but why does that one bracelet make so much difference to Sergeant Elliot?”
“It’s a good question.”
Maxine snapped her fingers above our heads. “Ha!” she shouted. “This is interesting. I looked up Barbara Litton. And guess what?”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Paul doesn’t often show off, but I suppose this time he couldn’t resist.